Droid - one of the most complicated phones (NYT)

I was going through new york times and there was an article about the droid saying how it is pretty complicated compared to the iPhone ( yes i know another iphone comparison). i actually agree with them. when ihad my iphone, i knew about everything possible to a jailbroken iphone in about 1 week's time. ive had my droid for 3 weeks and still have some very basic questions it seems about rooted droids etc

1. abd shell - can someone explain what this is, how you get to it.
will edit more g2g walk dogs
2.Download 7-zip 7-ZipIn a command prompt cd into your adb tools directory
what the hell does this mean/how do i get to this (for custom boot animation)

It's more complicated because it's open. Apple's limits on the iPod are very strict and you can only do so much. The "professional reviewers" never review a jailbroken iPod, but i believe a jailbroken and a non-jailbroken perform about the same, minus the ability to multitask

BTW, to the OP, there is always going to be a wee bit of a challenge to rooting or jailbreaking any phone, and there are many threads (and other websites) that explain how to do this, look in the hacks forum of this site. If someone cannot grasp the fundamentals of browsing the phone's directory, don't try to root your phone, especially for some silly animation, you may brick the phone if you can't even do the basics, like using 7zip.

I was going through new york times and there was an article about the droid saying how it is pretty complicated compared to the iPhone ( yes i know another iphone comparison). i actually agree with them. when ihad my iphone, i knew about everything possible to a jailbroken iphone in about 1 week's time. ive had my droid for 3 weeks and still have some very basic questions it seems about rooted droids etc

1. abd shell - can someone explain what this is, how you get to it.
will edit more g2g walk dogs
2.Download 7-zip 7-ZipIn a command prompt cd into your adb tools directory
what the hell does this mean/how do i get to this (for custom boot animation)

Click to expand...

1. adb shell is a command line utility that you can run from your computer to execute commands on the droid through a USB cable with USB debugging enabled. It is part of the Droid SDK.

2. 7zip is a compression utility. winRAR, winzip, or Windows' built in utility will work just as well.

3. cd = change directory, a basic command line utility. If you don't know what this is, stop now. Don't mess with your phone any more until someone releases GUI tools to do the legwork.

Basically, if you don't understand the underlying OS, you probably shouldn't be rooting your phone. Proof of this is the iPhone. How many people got Rick Astley slapped on their phones by a hacker because they couldn't follow the simple instruction of change the password on your ssh shell. They had no clue what ssh was, and just ignored that step, and left a back door wide open for a smart aleck hacker to "RickRoll" all their phones. Jailbreaking an iPhone is "easier because it was done...how long ago? They have made tools to make it simple to use because they know the majority of them are NOT going to be Linux savvy.

Android (and Droid in particular) has only more recently been rooted, and even then (in the case of the Droid) it is still fresh and raw, there are no tools to make it easy for "the masses" to root.

For the record, adb (not abd) is actually adb.exe it is a command line executable (short for android debugger) which is part of the SDK. At this point, honestly, anybody that thinks Eclipse is a celestial event and not a development environment, probably shouldn't be rooting their Droid yet. (That is of course just purely my opinion and everybody is free to do with their Droid what they want. I do not lecture... I suggest)

Yeah I love my phone but I tell people flat out that if you haven't figured out how to stop your vcr from blinking 12:00 then its probably not for you. Then again that same argument can be made for people who still use a vcr... but I drigress.

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